To choose the best movies of 2005 is to compromise. I limit my list of candidates to films that have screened in Chicago, but I could easily fill it with movies that haven’t screened in the U.S. at all, and God knows what I’ve missed altogether. I’m at the mercy of studio heads, distributors, and publicists, whose decisions about what to release and when defy comprehension.
- The World. Not just the best film of 2005, Jia Zhang-ke’s feature was better, or at least more important, than my first choices for 2004 (The Big Red One) and 2003 (25th Hour and Crimson Gold). Those earlier masterpieces lack its vital and complex vision of what the whole planet is like at the moment.
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Jia’s greatest film, Platform (2002), is about the Cultural Revolution; The World is a superb companion piece about China’s recent capitalist revolution, set in a theme park outside Beijing with scaled-down models of the world’s most famous tourist attractions and populated by visitors and workers. It’s a kitsch monstrosity that Jia makes endlessly fascinating and suggestive–in contrast to the cramped and unattractive “backstage” living spaces where the main characters spend most of their time when they’re not working. The animated fantasies sparked by characters’ text messages are often even more spacious and ethereal than the shots of the theme park. The play among all these spaces marks Jia as the most talented Asian director currently at work–with the possible exception of Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose hauntingly minimalist Cafe Lumiere will be playing at the Music Box in January.
Tropical Malady. All three features to date by Thai writer-director (and School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduate) Apichatpong Weerasethakul confirm that he’s one of the most creative and unpredictable film artists now working anywhere. Each time out he becomes more ambitious, though Mysterious Object at Noon and Blissfully Yours were hardly modest efforts. Part one of Tropical Malady shows the budding romance between a soldier on leave and a shy country boy with a mixture of irony and tenderness. Part two turns folkloric and allegorical as the soldier travels through a dark forest, alternately stalking and being stalked by his lover in the form of a tiger spirit, with a talking baboon offering sage advice.
A tie between two examples of not-quite science fiction, Hal Hartley’s modest The Girl From Monday and Wong Kar-wai’s almost Wagnerian 2046. Hartley’s hilarious futuristic satire imagines a “dictatorship of the consumer,” with citizens wearing bar codes on their wrists and regarded as “investments with growth potential,” especially when they have sex. Wong’s first film in ‘Scope, a labyrinth of longing, begins in the last year of Hong Kong’s economic and political independence but is set mainly in the 60s and concerns his parents’ generation.
Ten other movies I liked, in alphabetical order: The Beat That My Heart Skipped; The Brothers Grimm; Fear and Trembling; Goodbye, Dragon Inn; Lord of War; Notre Musique; Or (My Treasure); Play; The Producers; and Safe Conduct. My annual F.W. Murnau award, given to the film that did the most to alter my sense of film history, goes to the wonderful, radical 1966 Jacques Rivette documentary Jean Renoir, the Boss: A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir, or A Portrait of Jean Renoir by Michel Simon, or The Direction of Actors: Dialogue. Unlike most of what I saw in 2005, it was blissfully free of compromise.
